A thrifty yet irresistible Neapolitan dish of tomatoes, nuts, raisins, capers and olives, all sweated down in lots of olive oil and tossed through a tangle of spaghetti
’E Curti is a small, very good osteria in a town called Sant’Anastasia, which is perched on the slopes of Vesuvius about 13km north-east of Naples. We made a detour and stopped there two summers ago, thanks to the trusty Slow Food osteria guide (although no thanks to my navigating). One of the specialities at ’E Curti is spaghetti with dried nuts and fruit, capers, olives, herbs and a local variety of tomatoes called pomodori piennoli. The dish came about as a way of using up the dried fruit and nuts left over from Christmas, and its name, ’O sicchje ra munnezza, is a humorous nod to this resourcefulness – ’O sicchje meaning “bin” and ra munnezza “rubbish” in Neapolitan dialect.
Such joking is possible only if you are confident of how good something is. And the combination of tomatoes collapsed in extra-virgin olive oil and the texture from the various nuts, the slight sweetness from the fruit and the defiantly savoury capers and olives, all held in a twisted net of spaghetti, is extremely good. Which is in no small part due to the local olive oil and flavour of the pomodori piennoli, particularly because they can be hung and kept for months, wrinkling and developing in richness. That said, it is absolutely a dish that can be recreated with other tomatoes, especially sweet cherry or datterini tomatoes, or even tinned plum tomatoes (that you like the taste of) drained of their juice. Being able to recreate this is also thanks to a recipe directly from ’E Curti itself that is wonderful in its specificity, suggesting (among other ingredients): 16 pine nuts, 10 raisins, 18 capers, eight olives, half a kilo of tomatoes and 1kg spaghetti for eight people.
